Word: guns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Machine-Gun Bursts. The President's principal preoccupation was the impending State of the Union address and the budget message. So determined was he to shroud the drafting of the State of the Union speech in secrecy that he waited until week's end to announce when he would deliver it-right after Congress convenes this week, in a night-time appearance designed to draw a large television audience...
...alone was assigned to draft the speech, which is normally a team effort. Through the week, Cabinet officers and presidential aides slipped into the White House through a side door to deliver the latest budgetary figures and policy recommendations. Moyers, working at his small electric Smith-Corona, in machine-gun bursts of 100 words per minute, translated the reports into Johnsonian prose, sending off completed portions to wherever the President happened to be at the moment. Johnson worked endlessly on the crisp, newly typed pages with his favorite soft-lead pencils...
...sometimes intrudes. In 1965, the hospital was caught in crossfire between Viet Cong and Americans. Dr. Smith herded all her patients into the wards and got all but one, a boy in traction, onto the floor to reduce the risk of casualties from machine-gun bullets. When Americans urged her by phone from Kontum to take refuge in the city, she snapped: "Don't be ridiculous! I can't leave my patients." Then a stray bullet hit a woman in the thigh, and Dr. Smith was on the phone again, this time barking at an American commander: "Stop...
...anyone had told Patricia Smith when she entered the University of Washington that she would some day be pinned down by machine-gun fire, she would have hooted. Her first choice was journalism but, bored with that, she switched to premed. After internship, Dr. Smith became bored again, this time at the prospect of "tending to well babies and anxious mothers," so she worked for two years at a miners' hospital in depressed Appalachia. When that closed, Dr. Smith went to a Catholic women's organization, the Grail, and volunteered for overseas mission work...
...first look at the father has him holding a gun to his temples, and the whole play is a debate preceding his suicide. Much is left enigmatic (to their me, at least), such as the constantly reiterated fact that the father buried mostly Negroes, most of them preachers. It does seem pretty clear, however, that the two senses of the word "undertaker" are being punned on, as when the father says "The best preachers simply turn into undertakers and shoot themselves." These seem to be "undertakers" of suicide, rather than undertakers pure and simple...